Category: Philosophy

I liked this Michael Bérubé post; here is an excerpt:

…in the 1920s we were told that people with Down syndrome were incapable of learning to speak; in the 1970s, we were told that people with Down syndrome were incapable of learning how to read.  OK, so now the rationale for seeing these people as somewhat less than human is their likely comprehension of Woody Allen films.  Twenty years from now we’ll be hearing “sure, they get Woody Allen, but only his early comedies–they completely fail to appreciate the breakthrough of Interiors.”  Surely you understand my sense that the goalposts are being moved around here in a rather arbitrary fashion…

You’re looking for things people with Down syndrome can’t do, and I’m looking for things they can.  We each have our reasons, of course.  But I don’t accept the premise that cognitive capacity is a useful criterion for reading some people out of the human community, any more than you would accept the premise that we should grant rights to animals on the basis of whether humans think they do or don’t taste good with barbeque sauce.

Via Angus (and do read his snark on TFP), here is Paul Samuelson:

Libertarians are not just bad emotional cripples. They are also bad advice givers.

(Are there "good" emotional cripples?)  Four points should be noted:

1) Paul Samuelson is one of the truly great economists of the 20th century.

2) Hayek did in fact underestimate the robustness of liberty in social welfare states, though it is worth noting that his Constitution of Liberty very much endorses a social safety net and many other policies of the German FDP of that time.

3) This is the same Paul Samuelson who argued, as late as 1989, that the performance of the Soviet economy was a refutation of Hayek’s critique of central planning.

4) When I see people writing sentences of this kind, I imagine them pressing a little button which makes them temporarily less intelligent.  Because, indeed, that is how one’s brain responds when one employs this kind of emotionally charged rhetoric.

As you go through life and read various writers, I want you to keep this idea of the button in mind.  As you are reading, think "Ah, he [she] is pressing the button now!"

I am honored to share a symposium with Garry Kasparov, among other notables, including Robert Reich, Jagdish Bhagwati, Bernard Henri-Levy, Michael Novak, and others.  My answer to the question is "No, on balance" and here is my opening bit:

In matters of morality, the free market functions like an amplifier. By placing more wealth and resources at our disposal, it tends to boost and accentuate whatever character tendencies we already possess. The net result is usually favorable. Most people want a good life for themselves and for their families and friends, and such desires form a part of positive moral character. Markets make it possible for vast numbers of people, at every level of society, to strive for and achieve these common human ends.

There is much more at the links.

Recent research by economists Amy Finkelstein, Erzo Luttmer, and Matthew Notowidigdo suggests that you’ll get a bigger bang for your consumer buck by spending while you’re healthy, before old age starts to take the fun out of life’s indulgences.

Here is more.  I worry about the asymmetry between gaining happiness and avoiding pain.  Surely money for the young is better for the former but how about the latter?

From the hum of the city, while pondering fossil fuel consumption, Megan McArdle writes:

I understand that people’s desires for large houses in leafy suburbs
are every bit as valid as my ardent desire to live near the peaceful
hum of traffic.  Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a policy that
effects everyone equally, and the painful job of being an adult is
doing things we don’t like because they’re the morally right thing to
do.

From my mid-sized house in a leafy suburb, I will assume that a) environmental concerns are real, b) we will fall short of fixing those problems through public policy (Megan uses the word policy but mostly her post is about personal obligation), and c) we do in fact have personal obligations to limit consumption.  The question remains how much fun we can have.  Fossil fuel consumption isn’t necessarily the area of optimal sacrifice.  For instance here are two other options:

1. Send money and other forms of aid to the victims and future victims.

2. Have fewer children than otherwise, if only in the stochastic sense (e.g., don’t move to Alaska at a young age).  Climate change is not the last environmental burden we will place on the world and probably not even the biggest such burden, but fewer people does mean less human pressure along many environmental dimensions, present and future.

Assuming that restriction is indeed called for, either of those might be more personally imperative than:

3. Fly and drive less and buy a smaller house.

Most people focus on #3 because lower energy consumption makes them feel less affiliated with the particular problem at hand.  But instrumentally speaking at a low discount rate #2 is more potent and at any discount rate #1 can be a more effective form of aid to the victims.

In this setting, I can see a few theories of our duties:

a. Do that which yields the highest net social return if only you do it.

b. Do that which yields the highest net social return if many people were to do it.

c. Cut back on your activities which most closely resemble aggressive interference into the lives of others.

d. Perform the action most likely to influence the behavior of others.

Belief in "a" favors sending money.  Belief in "b" favors having fewer children.  Belief in "c" favors restricting your driving and flying.  I am not sure which course of action follows from belief in "d."

You might think that you should do some mix of 1, 2, and 3,  But if your MU schedules are sufficiently flat, an argument from Steven Landsburg implies it is optimal to concentrate your sacrifice in a single "best returns" project.  So it may suffice to pick either 1, 2, or 3 and do it very well.

The bottom line: Perhaps I should call this blog post An Apology for Me.

As Thomas Pogge has noted in his recent biography John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice,
Rawls was especially sensitive to issues of luck because of a sad
occurrence in his own life. Two of his brothers died in childhood
because they had contracted fatal illnesses from him. Pogge calls the
loss of the brothers the “most important events in Jack’s childhood.”
In 1928, the 7-year-old Rawls contracted diphtheria. His brother Bobby,
younger by 20 months, visited him in his room and was fatally infected.
The next winter, Rawls contracted pneumonia. Another younger brother,
Tommy, caught the illness from him and died.

That’s from libertarian David Gordon, whom I suspect has never infected anybody.  The hat tip goes to Will Wilkinson, who in his post describes himself as a "neo-sentimentalist."  I can just imagine Kerry (his girlfriend) saying to Will on their third date: "Oh, Will, you’re such a neo-sentimentalist!" 

I don´t usually link to videos but I loved this one.  Note: I believe the action is staged, not real.  But still, all you Chilean pessimists need to reconsider.  You set the bar for Chile pretty high (which is good, I might add).

I thanks Carlos Scartascini for the pointer.

Here is an excerpt:

Q: What does love feel like? A: Like a great misfortune, a monstrous
parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small
pleasures. Q: Have you ever said ‘I love you’ and not meant it? A: All
the time. When I really love someone, I can only show it by making
aggressive and bad-taste remarks. Q: Tell us a secret. A: Communism
will win.

Here is the full interview, via Finoculous.  It contains further revelations.  A few months ago I spent some time browsing his latest book in Borders.  He can’t simply admit: "I was a fool to follow Mao and Stalin" but instead he has to push the line "I just need to reinterpret everybody more and I will still find some movement for "egalitarian terror" [those two words are his] to sign on to."  Grow up, I say, yet he is almost sixty years old.

Will Wilkinson cuts through the book’s odd organization:

To be happy is to be loved and praised. Also, to be happy is stoic
indifference to love and praise. The love of high relative standing is
based on misery-making self-deception. And this self-deception turns
the wheels of industry, which produces wealth, and leaves even those of
low relative position in a good absolute position. Which is all you
really need to be happy! That is, as long as you are stoically
indifferent to love and praise, to relative position. Which, really,
none of us are, because, OMG, we really really want other
people to think highly of us. And, hey, again, that’s a pretty good
thing when you think about it, otherwise none of us would be
self-deceived enough to do all the crazy hard work that creates the
wealth that leaves us all in a good absolute material position. So, you
personally should probably worry about becoming actually praiseworthy,
instead of just seeking to receive praise, because you’ll be happier if
you deserve it, whether or not you get it. Unless everyone is doing
this. In which case we’ll all just be poor, which isn’t good at all.

You’ll find the other foot at the link.  The book is arguably a comic tragedy and you could write a third foot about the role of fortune in the argument.  Will is maybe reading a bit backwards from Wealth of Nations, but for a Platonist (I’m not saying Will is one) this should be allowed.

[T]he statement "All models are wrong, but some are useful"
is itself a model (of an epistemological system, with many competing
models) and thus is paradoxical, being true only if it isn’t. Moreover,
although it asserts directly that some models are useful and indirectly
that others are not, the statement tells as [sic] nothing as to which is which, so it is not, itself, useful.

That’s from Germany, by the way (original source here).  Now ponder it!  Even better, the same guy offers (useful) tips on how to cut health care costs.

The original indirect tip is from Seth Roberts.

If there is one message writ large within the annals of anthropology, it is to beware the solid truths of one’s own culture.  If we contrast our views with those of others, we find that what we take to be "reliable knowledge" is more properly considered a form of folklore.

That is from Kenneth J. Gergen’s often quite interesting The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life.

On BloggingHeads.TV, self-recommending.

Taking a cue from the publisher, Amazon.com reports:

[Richard] Tuck presents a bold challenge to the skeptical account of social
cooperation so widely held today.  If accepted, his argument may over
time encourage more public-spirited behavior.

Richard Tuck, of course, is a Professor of Government and Harvard and a historian of early modern political thought.  This book has many complicated philosophic arguments, here are bites of three of them:

1. If your cooperative behavior adds positively to a Sorites problem ("how many stones make a pile?"), it can be rational for a self-interested person to see good reason to contribute.

2. Under a properly sophisticated theory of causality (with or without Sorites), you might see your contribution as helping to cause a good end to come about, even if your contribution is not "necessary" for the good end to occur.  The phrase "pre-emptive cooperation" is used.

3. Rule rather than act utilitarianism often has (rational) force on people’s behavior.

Since there is more cooperation than standard models would predict, we can’t dismiss these arguments, which by the way are used to claim that standard economic reasoning is historically contingent.  By the end of the book we are told that perfect competition may operate as oligopoly and that — don’t be surprised — more government may be both necessary and desirable.   

Think of this as a kind of verbal game theory, written for people who won’t read technical game theory or formulate a precise solution concept.  I don’t think this looser approach is always worse, though the exposition could have been more to the point.

Here is a podcast for the book.  Here are the first twenty pages.

Stephen Dubner asks, his readers answer.  I say dead people don’t count and give your answers in the comments.  Can I consider Tim Berners-Lee for my nomination or Marc Andreessen — you used a browser to read this post — or whichever single person is most responsible for Google or search more generally?  I don’t intend any slight to Richard Dawkins or the others but I just don’t see how they stand up to these guys.

Addendum: Arnold Kling nominates Vinton Cerf.